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Studying Autism's Origins & Causes

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Children with autism often have problems with metaphors and make-believe. “I don’t play with things that aren’t real,” one autistic child
told Pitt neuroscientist Nancy Minshew.

As Minshew knows, autistic children have no problem with basics
of mental function—they can see, hear, and remember facts, and many have
average or even above-average IQs. For one study, Minshew gave 56 autistic
children a series of neuropsychological tests, then compared their performance
with that of non-autistic peers. Children with autism performed well on basic
functional tests but less so on complicated ones, corroborating Minshew’s
belief that autism stems from disordered information processing and
underdeveloped neural systems.

Minshew directs Pitt’s Center for Excellence in Autism
Research, made up of scientists from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University,
and Duquesne University who conduct research on the cognitive, neurological,
and genetic bases of autism. When Minshew first started studying autism,
psychologists believed it originated from only one region of the brain, but
Minshew was convinced the disorder, which encompasses many symptoms, likewise
had to stem from many regions.

Along with Pitt professor Beatriz Luna, Minshew also
conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that offered the
first visual evidence that the neural wiring of people with autism is
incomplete. In people with normal neurological functioning, certain parts of
the brain exhibited more pronounced neural activity while performing high-level
functioning tasks compared to autistic people performing the same tasks.

As part of a consortium of scientists from all over the
world called the Autism Genome Project, Pitt researchers contributed to the
largest genome scan ever completed in the history of autism research. Pitt’s Bernie
Devlin noted the project “represents a new beginning in autism research and
provides an invaluable resource to researchers worldwide. We hope that access
to the tools and information developed through this project will help
researchers unravel the causes of autism.”

Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health has launched
a multi-year study to help identify environmental and other factors that may
put children at risk for developing autism. By studying parents of both autistic
and non-autistic children, the study hopes to determine if there have been
substantial differences in environmental and other exposures.

The Pittsburgh Early Autism Study studies infants
with autistic older siblings to look for infant behaviors that may predict
later diagnosis of autism. Pitt professors Jana Iverson and Mark Strauss hope the study will benefit local families while contributing to the current
body of knowledge on autism.